Date:
Location:
"A Rational Framework for What? Race and the Ethos of Science from the Modern Synthesis to Genomics"
Speaker:
Tito Brige de Carvalho, PhD Candidate, Sociology and Science Studies, University of California, San Diego; Visiting Research Fellow, Program on Science, Technology & Society, Harvard Kennedy School.
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Contact:
Shana Ashar
shana_ashar@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday, October 18th.
Abstract:
In 1937, the evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote: “An endless and notoriously inconclusive discussion of the ‘problem of race’ has been going on in the biological, anthropological, and sociological literatures. Stripped of unnecessary verbiage, the question is this: Is a ‘race’ a concrete entity existing in nature or a mere abstraction with very limited usefulness?” Today, the debate remains all but intractable. In this presentation, I will argue that while many biologists, historians, philosophers, and sociologists have tended to focus on ontological and epistemological questions about race—what it is and how we can know it—STS scholars from the co-productionist tradition can offer a better grasp of the problem. Rather than adjudicate between different concepts of race at play in diverse fields of knowledge, I trace the normative claims that various scientists have made—including how science should be practiced and to what ends—as they have sought public trust and other social supports.
Biography:
Tito Carvalho is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, and since 2016, a research fellow in the Program on Science, Technology & Society at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is interested in questions of scientific expertise, public trust, and social authority. His dissertation, tentatively titled “A Naturalist in the Land of the Masters and the Slaves: Race, Biology, and Sociology in the U.S. and Brazil,” is a comparative analysis of the scientific study of, and public reason about, race in those two countries. He also has a master’s degree in bioethics, policy, and law, and a bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in philosophy. His forthcoming article “A Most Bountiful Source of Inspiration,” appearing in the Brazilian journal of the history of science, Manguinhos, traces the work that the evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky conducted in Brazil, placing it in the contexts of the development of modern evolutionary biology and the defense of scientific expertise in the middle of the twentieth century.
